Glaxo Wellcome appears to have abandoned plans to merge with the US drugs giant Bristol Myers Squibb. Sources claim that informal meetings had taken place, but merger negotiations broke down at the end of last year and are unlikely to be resumed. However, it is thought that Glaxo is looking...
Developments in the use of gene therapy to treat muscular dystrophy and haemophilia have been reported in the past week. A team of scientists at the Salk Institute in California announced in the American journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that a form of haemophilia in mice had...
A mother who gave birth to another woman's child after a mix-up at a New York fertility clinic has decided to hand the baby back to its biological parents. Donna Fasano gave birth three months ago to twin boys - one white and one black - after her fertility...
Dolly the cloned sheep has given birth to three lambs at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Dolly's first pregnancy resulted in just one lamb born in April last year. All the lambs were conceived naturally and all have the same father, a Welsh mountain ram called David. Dr Harry Griffin...
A report published last Monday shows that many people are unaware of medical advances that can treat or prevent inherited genetic diseases. Action Research, the medical charity that commissioned the Mori research, said that as a result, more than half of the surveyed group said they would avoid having children...
At a conference in London last week, Dr Anne McLaren of the Wellcome CRC Institute in Cambridge (UK) said that the first application of cloning techniques in cell therapy was likely to be for bone marrow grafts for children suffering from leukaemia. She predicted that this might be possible in...
An increasingly popular fertility treatment used in cases of male infertility could lead to a slight increase in genetic abnormalities in resulting offspring. It may also affect the cellular machinery inside sperm cells during fertilisation, according to a study of the technique in animals. However, experts say the results are...
The Wellcome Trust is locked in an increasingly bitter struggle with the local planning authority over its proposal to extend its Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire. Last week's public enquiry merely confirmed the deadlock, with the local authority still opposed to the extension. Wellcome wants to provide space for small...
George W Bush's campaign to win the Republican nomination for next year's presidential elections has suffered a set-back after he received criticism from pro-life republicans for not having a tough enough stance on abortion. Although he is more popular than his nine rivals for the nomination, opposition from pro-lifers, who...
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Embryo mix-ups at New York fertility clinic
by Juliet Tizzard
This week's BioNews includes the story of a New York woman, Donna Fasano, who was implanted not only with her own embryos, but also those of another woman. The result was a twin pregnancy - one twin being the genetic child of Mrs Fasano and the other child being the genetic...